Audio Video Show Warsaw 2026 – Golden PiG Awards

October 30, 2026

THE GOLDEN PiG AWARDS AT WARSAW AUDIO VIDEO SHOW 2026

Audio Video Show Warsaw 2026 – Golden PiG Awards
av show warsaw
warsaw hifi show 2026

The HiFi PiG Golden PiG Award is fast becoming THE award to be awarded at HiFi shows around the world. Read on to find out who won our two Golden PiG’s at the Audio Video Show Warsaw 2026.

It’s not an award for the best sound of the show, and we’ve long held and shared the view that HiFi shows aren’t necessarily the best places to make definitive comments about the sound of the systems being played. Of course, sound comes into our decision-making process, but we also look at how the room has been dressed, the presentation of the system, the staff involved and how professional and knowledgeable they are, and all those little details that come together to make a room truly spectacular. It’s about the whole experience rather than just how a system sounds during the relatively short time we get to spend listening to it.

GOLDEN PIG AWARD – UBIQAUDIOLAB AT THE STADIUM

At Warsaw Audio Video Show 2026, we gave away two Golden PiG Awards, one for the hotel venues and one for the stadium. At the stadium, the award went to the Ubiqaudiolab room, which was being manned by the good people from UK distributor Absolute Sounds. However, before getting on to why this room won, I think it’s worth mentioning the room immediately next door, where Lirogon was celebrating its first anniversary, having made its debut at this very show in Warsaw a year earlier.

Lirogon makes electrostatic loudspeakers, and my impression of both the room and the sound was that they were superlative in pretty much every respect. The system featured Lirogon Origin loudspeakers driven by VTL Siegfried Reference monoblock power amplifiers, with a VTL 6.5 preamplifier and VTL 6.5 phono stage. Sources included an Everest Ascent server, Playback MDP-6 and J. Sikora Standard Max Supreme turntable fitted with an Aidas True Stone Violet Gold Coil cartridge. ZenSati #1 cabling was used alongside a Network Acoustics Muon² filter system, Muon² Switch, Origin and Muon² USB, while acoustic treatment was by Nyquista. It was a fabulous room, and had we not just stepped out of the Ubiqaudiolab demonstration, I think the Lirogon room would have been receiving the Golden PiG Award for the stadium. Not bad going for a brand that’s only been around for a year, and certainly one to keep an eye on.

However, back to the actual winners of the Golden PiG Award for the stadium: Ubiqaudiolab. The Slovenian company is part of the Akrapovič Group, which is perhaps better known for its high-performance exhaust systems for motorcycles and cars. The company has spent years developing its audio electronics, and Warsaw 2026 marked the world premiere of its new product line. The system on demonstration featured four Ubiqaudiolab UBICUBE 700 power amplifiers, each capable of delivering 700W into 8 ohms, alongside the company’s Ubiquitous 300B preamplifier. The latter is a hybrid design using Western Electric 300B valves, one per channel, in a dual-mono Class A configuration. The UBICUBE 700 amplifiers are substantial pieces of equipment, each weighing 101kg and delivering up to 2,000W into 2 ohms. These were driving Wilson Audio Autobiography flagship loudspeakers with Subsonic subwoofers, while the digital front end was a dCS Varèse music system. Cabling throughout was from Transparent’s flagship range.

*Lin presented the Golden PiG Award to Igor Akrapovič of Ubiqaudiolab*

Ordinarily, I’m not a fan of timed or ticketed presentations at HiFi shows, but in this instance, it made perfect sense given the sheer volume of traffic and the number of people wanting to experience the system. The presentation itself was absolutely on point, with enough information about the equipment and the thinking behind it to pique one’s interest, but brief enough that it never became boring or felt like you were being lectured to. This is something that isn’t always easy to get right, particularly when dealing with equipment of this complexity, but the Absolute Sounds team managed it brilliantly. The room was immaculately dressed, the lighting was perfect, and the whole thing felt like a properly considered experience rather than simply a collection of expensive boxes put together in a big room.

And then there was the sound, which was nothing short of spectacular. I’ve never heard Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here sound quite so wonderful or lifelike as it did in this room, played from tape. There was a sense of realism and presence that was genuinely captivating, and it was one of those moments at a HiFi show where you find yourself forgetting about the equipment and simply enjoying what you’re hearing. Of course, as I’ve already said, the Golden PiG isn’t awarded purely on sonic performance, but when you combine a demonstration like this with the care taken over the room, the presentation, the professionalism of the people involved and all the little things that make the experience special, then you have something that really does stand out. Ubiqaudiolab and Absolute Sounds thoroughly deserved their Golden PiG Award, though I suspect the Lirogon team next door might have been wondering just how close they came!

GOLDEN PiG AWARD – SILENT POUND AT THE SOBIESKI

Over at the Sobieski, the decision as to who should receive the Golden PiG Award was unanimous between the four of us, which is something of a rarity, given that there’s usually a fair bit of heated discussion before we come to a decision. This year, however, there was no argument whatsoever, and the award went to Silent Pound, the Lithuanian loudspeaker manufacturer headed up by Audrius and Martynas, along with the rest of their team. They were showing in what was actually quite a small room, with just three high chairs for visitors to sit and experience their latest loudspeakers, the Silent Pound Parallax. What impressed us immediately was how they’d taken what could have been a rather awkward space and used it to absolutely brilliant effect. Everything felt considered and purposeful, and rather than trying to cram as many people as possible into the room, they’d created a space where visitors could actually sit, listen and engage with what was going on. And engage is perhaps the important word here, because the way Audrius, Martynas and the rest of the team interacted with visitors was absolutely fantastic. Now, we’re well aware that we tend to get a little preferential treatment when we visit rooms at shows, but what struck us here was that everyone who came through the door was treated with exactly the same enthusiasm, warmth and willingness to explain what they were doing and why.

The loudspeakers themselves are quite something, too. The Silent Pound Parallax is a passive 3.5-way design that takes the company’s approach to controlled directivity, as seen in its Challenger and Bloom models, and pushes it considerably further. Each loudspeaker uses no fewer than four 15-inch woofers in a folded-dipole arrangement, with four midrange drivers surrounding a centrally positioned horn-loaded compression driver. The latter arrangement is designed to behave as a virtual coaxial source, and the whole concept is intended to control how sound is dispersed into the room, including at low frequencies. Claimed frequency response is 24Hz to 20kHz, with a sensitivity of 91dB, and the speakers can be used with a single amplifier or bi-amped, with a switch allowing users to select between the two configurations. The front baffle is made from oak, supported by an aluminium frame, while the crossover is displayed behind tempered glass. Stack Audio AUVA 70 feet complete the design. They are big, unusual and, in many respects, utterly bonkers loudspeakers, but there’s clearly a huge amount of thought and engineering gone into them.

However, what really impressed me about this room, and particularly the people in it, was something that went well beyond the equipment itself. Much like Igor from Ubiqaudiolab, Audrius, Martynas and the Silent Pound team are following a dream, and you could feel that in absolutely everything they were doing. There’s a genuine enthusiasm and determination to create something truly groundbreaking and out of the ordinary, and it’s infectious. They aren’t simply putting together another loudspeaker to add to an already crowded market; they’re pursuing an idea that they clearly believe in, and they’re prepared to do things differently to achieve it. When dreams, passion and determination come together, this is the kind of thing you can expect, and whilst the whole concept might seem a little mad on paper, in practice it works brilliantly. All four of us came away from the room hugely impressed, not just by what we’d heard, but by the attitude and sheer commitment of the people responsible for making it happen.

I’ve said before that HiFi is about much more than boxes that make noises, and this was one of those occasions that rather brought that home to me. I found the whole experience genuinely inspirational, and I do mean that. In fact, I was quite emotionally moved by it all, which isn’t something I can say happens particularly often when wandering around a HiFi show. There’s something rather wonderful about meeting people who have an idea, believe in it completely and then put everything they have into making it a reality. Silent Pound thoroughly deserved their Golden PiG Award, and I cannot wait to hear the Parallax again, and hopefully spin a few tunes through it myself, when we visit the team in Lithuania. If the Warsaw demonstration was anything to go by, that’s going to be a very special experience indeed.

HOW TO WIN A HiFi PiG GOLDEN PiG AWARD?

If you’d like to be in with a chance of winning a Golden PiG Award at a future show, then perhaps the most important thing we can say is this: don’t treat the HiFi PiG team as being special in any way. We’re not. We’re just a bunch of folk who go along to HiFi shows and report on what we see and hear, hopefully giving those who couldn’t attend a sense of what it was like to actually be there. The point is that everyone who walks into your room should be made to feel special, whether they’re a member of the press, a potential customer or someone who’s simply curious about what all this HiFi malarkey is about. The way a room is dressed matters, the lighting matters, the ambience matters, and the way a system is presented and explained matters. Most importantly, though, the way you treat the people who have taken the time to come and visit your room matters enormously.

We know that we aren’t going to change attitudes and behaviours that have been entrenched in the HiFi show circuit for decades overnight, but we do think the time has come to expect a little more. Frankly, we no longer think it’s acceptable for a brand to turn up at a show, plonk a load of equipment at the front of an otherwise undressed hotel room and spend three days playing a selection of tunes they think show off their system to best effect. We also fully appreciate just how much time, effort and money goes into exhibiting at these international events, and we’re certainly not suggesting that everyone needs to spend a fortune on elaborate room designs or theatrical presentations. A bit of thought, some attention to detail and a genuine desire to make visitors feel welcome can go an awfully long way, and none of those things necessarily costs a great deal of money.

We hope exhibitors take notice of what we’re trying to achieve with the Golden PiG Awards, though we obviously can’t force anyone to change the way they do things, nor would we want to. What we can do is recognise and celebrate those who go that extra mile and hopefully encourage others to do likewise. Ultimately, we believe that visitors to HiFi shows deserve MORE. They deserve to feel special, they deserve to feel that someone has made a real effort to give them an experience worth remembering, and they absolutely deserve the same warmth, attention and respect that members of the press so often receive. After all, without those visitors, there wouldn’t be much point in having a HiFi show in the first place, would there?